Manohla Dargis

Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental.

The problem is that while there are dance performances scattered throughout The White Crow, as well as interludes with a sweaty Rudy practicing and striving, the offstage scenes tend to feel like filler, the bits stuck between the barre and the theater.

The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in The Curse of La Llorona, an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story.

DaCosta is better at setting scenes than digging into them.

Social realism in a symbolist key, Dogman is at times more pleasurable to look at than to experience.

Drowsy in feel and muted in color, Stockholm is lightly amusing and watchable — mostly thanks to Hawke — but never makes the case that this is a story that needed to be told, with or without laughs.

Too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.

It’s a nice change of pace for a big-screen mega-comic, if not a revolutionary shift.

Daggar-Nickson gestures in certain directions, but for the most part she avoids deeper, troubling questions about retribution and violence. Instead, she concentrates on the genre basics, as in the movie’s admirably hard-core final face-off.

Ho-hum until it takes a turn toward the fascinatingly weird, the movie is a welcome declaration of artistic independence for Burton...Watching him cut loose (more recklessly than his flying baby elephant) is by far the most unexpected pleasure of this movie, which dusts off the 1941 animated charmer with exhilaratingly demented spirit.

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors.

The movie is generally watchable, even at its slowest and ugliest, simply because the actors are solid even when their characters are repellent.

The Mustang is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.

An immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor.

As a performer, Moore can go big, and a terrible yowl here pierces the heart. But she’s a virtuoso of restraint. She shows you the rush of emotions just before they break the surface, so the hurt and confusion flicker on her face like minute shifts of light.

Chandor handles the action scenes smoothly, making it easy to gloss over what the movie is saying, trying to say or accidentally saying. He maintains the kind of accelerated pace that gives your eyes a workout, and pads the story with an inviting camaraderie that brings you into the group.

By turns intimate and expansive, Transit is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie.

A taut moral thriller, Styx is a story of what happens when self-reliance runs into other people’s desperation.

Like its amiable, irresistible ménage, Fighting With My Family softens its rougher edges with humor. It’s often broadly funny but never mean or patronizing; it takes the Knights, their eccentricities and quixotic aspirations seriously, but not enough to squelch the fun.

A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.

Akerlund, a veteran music-video director who intersperses Lords of Chaos with mildly surrealistic bursts, never establishes a coherent or interesting point of view. The tone unproductively veers from the goofy to the creepy, which creates a sense that he was still figuring it out in the editing.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part isn’t as distractingly fun, shiny and bright as the more satisfying franchise installments. It drags and sometimes bores, which makes it easier for your mind to drift elsewhere.

Shyamalan’s talent for primitive scares remains intact in Glass, as does his love for cramming a whole lot of story in one feature.

Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the The Aspern Papers, based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.

Kusama is still figuring out how to balance form and pulp, but she has a singular unapologetic idea about what women can and cannot do onscreen, one she lets rip with verve and her superbly unbound star.

The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.

What’s odd here is how closely the new movie follows the original’s arc without ever capturing its bliss or tapping into its touching delicacy of feeling.

The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.